


As I Relive My Life

by Jennypen



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Lance will aways be with Shiro in my mind, So it's only hinted at, but it's shiro okay, but the zine this was for specified it was not to be stated who his relationship is with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 12:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14164605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennypen/pseuds/Jennypen
Summary: On the difference between 'home' and 'home home'.Lance returns home and muses over what home really means.





	As I Relive My Life

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally written for a zine that stalled completely. I wrote it a few months back, but have only gotten around to posting it now. It was meant to explore the common feeling of going back to your childhood home after having moved out. I don't think I've ever agonised over the wording of any single fic so much in my entire life.

Peter Pan never grew up. Nameless ancient live-action films aside, Peter Pan had achieved the childhood ideal and stayed young forever. In the face of abandonment, loss, and being the figurehead for good in the eternal battle against evil, Peter Pan had held onto his naïveté and earnest nature, steadfast and true.

The same could not be said for Lance—though he’d actively maintained his own personal sense of honesty, any innocence he’d retained shortly into adolescence had vanished in the wake of the Galra, cast asunder by the horrors of war and the atrocities he’d seen (and been involved in. He didn’t like to think about the ones he’d been the cause of—the five years it had taken to uproot the toughest of Galran strongholds meant that it would have been impossible for even Lance to have never put a foot wrong).

Being here made that easier. The most difficult parts of his life over the last few years seemed almost like a strange nightmare when he was shuffling from foot to foot, standing on the same doormat he’d beaten the dust out of a thousand times, ringing the same doorbell that his uncle had installed when he was eight and, yes, same obnoxious ringtone that his older brother had programmed in the same day and no one had ever been able to change. He’d heard someone once say the more things changed the more they stayed the same, but Lance had never understood that until the door opened and his mother— _ Mama, Mama! _ —quirked an eyebrow at him. She had paused for a moment upon recognising him, with a face that Lance knew all too well was her being torn between hugging him and giving him a clatter upside the head. He had expected nothing less.

Lance didn’t let her make the choice, leaping forward to dive into her arms, delighting at her startled expletive as he buried his face against her comfortably sizeable bosom. Her swearing was as affectionate as he’d ever heard it, though, as her arms came up instantly to wrap around him. He squeezed her middle, feeling her shake in response, and laughed as he pulled away to find his own forming tears mirrored on her face.

For all her colourful reaction, there had been no surprise in any of it—Sam Holt’s less-than-clandestine return to Earth, legend of Voltron and inarguable proof thereof exploding on the Internet as he arrived, had given Lance’s family the time to prepare for their late son’s miraculous return to life, a preparation evident in his mother’s lack of screaming (it was no mystery from whence he’d inherited his flair for the dramatic) and the enormous room full of food behind her. Once she’d stepped aside to admit her son and his few companions, the floodgates opened as his family descended on him in a wave of excitement and laughter.

Long into the night, after the food had been demolished, the cellar drained completely of alcohol and the last inebriated stragglers had been booted out of the backyard pool and tucked up into bed, the house finally slept, but Lance perched on the edge of his bed, staring out of the open curtains, watching the soft, rippling reflection of the half moon in the stretch of the sea. The bed shifted and he smiled as its other occupant shuffled in sleep, heavy breaths soured with celebratory wine. Of the things that had most definitely changed, him being allowed to sleep with someone in his room had been a very pleasant surprise, even if there had been that mildly awkward moment as Lance realised his teenage posters were, in fact, still on the wall.

On the growing list of things that had not changed—his room.

His vision was liquor-blurry but it did not take a sharp eye to work out what had happened, and Lance’s heart ached—a thick layer of dust covered every inch of the room, too established for the rushed clean-up job someone had attempted to have made a difference; every book, every shelf, and even the slightly turned-down corners of his posters were ethereally grey with the weight of empty years. Only his sheets were fresh, and it told Lance that one day, his mother had locked the door to his room and never again darkened the door frame until she’d been hit with the sudden news that her son was, in fact, alive and well and saving the galaxy.

He almost wished he’d been there to see the look on her face, but he rather enjoyed every look she gave him now, anyhow.

The moon afforded him the chance to see just a little of his room, but his eyes were instantly drawn to the brightest objects on his windowsill—Lance reached out and picked up the few seashells resting there, blowing gently to remove the lightest dust. His fingers smoothed over the ridges, brushing aside the settled grime of the half decade since they’d been handled last, and he remembered when he’d collected each one—all from the same stretch of sand, each a prized treasure, every addition to the small collection only swelling his love for them all.

His pride and joy, slowly buried by neglect for the crime of being a painful reminder.

Fingers moving slowly, Lance rubbed the dirt out of, and a little spitshine into, each shell in turn, marvelling at how, even muted in the pale moonlight, the colours shone through. Time passed as he worked, and by the time he was finished, the first streaks of brilliant orange had begun to leap from below the horizon.

It struck him, then, how many sunrises that his little seashells had seen without him. Sunsets, too. In space he’d seen a thousand light-rises as they’d navigated past planets and around stars, and it felt odd, knowing his seashells and he had lived entirely different lives in that regard, aged under entirely different light.

At least it did not have to stay that way, not anymore.

Satisfied, Lance noticed the very first hint of the sun poking up above the surface of the sea, before his exhaustion finally outweighed his circling thoughts and he leaned back to snuggle under the covers, seeking out the comforting body heat already long asleep inside.

* * *

Breakfast the next day was an amusing affair. Late enough to be considered brunch, not one member of Lance’s family had managed to do much beyond grab a robe on the way to their kitchen, and each time the dining table swelled to accommodate another mophead of bed hair, the volume of laughter rose exponentially.

By the time all of Voltron and Coran and Allura and Lance’s  _ entire _ family were present, the conversation was lively enough to have energised even the sleepiest leftover from the previous night’s revelry.

“One of the strangest things you have to learn,” Keith was saying, cheeks slightly red at the look of abject wonder on Lance’s younger cousins’ faces, “is not to be complacent. Once, the castle itself was infected by an alien consciousness.”

“Right!” Lance chimed in. “It tried to kill me!”

“Really?” Esteban, Lance’s older brother. There was a note of disbelief in his voice.

“Sadly, yes,” Coran answered, drawing the rapt attention of the entire gathering. “We were all attacked in some way, but Lance was put in the cryo chamber and almost jettisoned out of an airlock into space.”

Lance shivered. “Don’t remind me.”

There was a brief pause, and Esteban looked at Lance with a grin. “Once, I came home to visit and the treadmill in my room started up out of nowhere at three a.m. Scared the living daylights outta me.”

“You screamed like the tiniest baby,” Lance’s mother agreed, causing Pidge and Hunk to descend into laughter, but Lance had an entirely different thought.

“Why is there a treadmill in your room?”

“It’s Dad’s,” Esteban said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

“Huh? Why’s it in your room, then?”

“…Because that’s where it fits?”

Lance was confused, but Esteban seemed even more confused at his lack of comprehension.

“But… but that’s  _ your _ room.”

“Dude, I moved out like four years ago. It  _ was _ my room. Now it has a treadmill and a rowing machine in it.” He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I got my own entire house now, I don’t mind.”

“Feels weird,” Lance murmured.

“Yes,” a new voice added, calmly. Shiro. “But it’s normal. My dad didn’t even wait for me to move to the Garrison before they started putting stuff in my room. I actually had to help my mom put her ab circle pro together. Weirdest day ever. I skedaddled before she tried it out.”

“Ah,” Coran chuckled, idly twisting one edge of his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. “A universal ritual, it seems. I recall the first time I visited home after having moved into the Castle of Lions, to find my mother had installed an entire lindypool where my bed had been! Wasn’t much fun, trying to sleep in a lindypool, especially with all the lindies nipping at your toes!” 

As with all conversations, it drifted on to different topics, but Lance’s mind stayed, mulling over what he’d heard. Having come back to a room practically untouched since last he’d owned it, it felt so strange that everyone else had no issue with the loss of their childhood spaces. Even the idea that Esteban’s room was not really  _ Esteban’s room _ anymore unsettled him in a way he could not quite identify, to the point that he did not realise that everyone else had vacated the kitchen and he was left alone with only his mother watching him shrewdly as he cleaned the last of the dishes, lost in thought.

“ _ Mijo _ ,” he heard from behind him, and he jumped. “Something on your mind?”

Five years apart and she could still read him better than anyone. Well, almost anyone.

“Why isn’t it Esteban’s room anymore?”

He kept his eyes on the task at hand, but she closed the distance between them enough that he could get a sense of her expression. “It is.”

“Then why’s there a treadmill in it?”

“Because that’s where it fit.”

That simple truth was maddening in how little sense it made. “I don’t understand.”

“Lance.” Her voice was so gentle but brooked no argument,; a trait Lance recognised as being the same reason Shiro commanded so much authority when he wanted to. “Putting a treadmill in Esteban’s room doesn’t stop it being Esteban’s room. He just uses it differently now—he has his own entire house. He stays in his room when his family visit, we move out the treadmill to make room for the cot.”

“But…”

“Oh, little love,” she smiled, drawing him into her, uncaring about the dish soap bubbles that soaked into her robe. “I know it feels strange. It’s strange for us too. We’ve both had this static picture of each other for the last five years, haven’t we?” He nodded. “We’ve all moved on and grown a little bit. The only thing that stayed the same was your room, and that was only because… we were mourning, and trying to preserve your memory. We weren’t expecting you to come home, baby. We wanted to hold onto the Lance we had, even though the real thing was out there the whole time, growing and living and making new memories.”

He hugged her a little tighter.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said in that forever-soothing voice of hers. He nodded, not wanting to meet her gaze, afraid it would break the spell holding his tears back. “You got a room in this castle of yours?”

“Mmhmm,” he acknowledged. 

“Got lots of stuff in it?”

“Mmhmm.”

“When you go back, why don’t you take those seashells of yours?”

Lance yanked himself back to stare wide-eyed at her. “Mom?”

She was grinning—the same smug grin he used himself on occasion (on rarer occasion nowadays, the more maturity settled in his frame). “If you suggest for one moment that you are even entertaining the notion of staying here, you’ve got another thing coming. Your boots are far too big for this house—you’ve seen things we can barely believe, and done the impossible. You’ve saved the universe, Lance, and you’ve found a whole other family in the process. Esteban moved out and all he did was find a woman who would give him the time of day, and he’s  _ happy _ . You defeated a ten-thousand-year-old intergalactic warlord, freed millions,  _ and _ found love. Your home is where you make it, my little love, and you’ve made yours in the stars.” She lifted her hand to brush the trail of tears from his cheek. “The universe doesn’t stop needing Voltron just because one face of evil has been defeated. My job was to give you every opportunity to find your place in the universe, and I know now that you have. Am I wrong?”

“No,” Lance sniffled. “You’re never wrong. Except for…” He paused. “No, no, you’re never wrong. Dammit.”

“Of course. Mother’s privilege.” She ruffled his hair and he laughed, feeling himself able to draw up to his full height, shoulders lighter than even just a moment ago. “You’ll go. And you’ll be happy. And you’ll call me every so often or so help me God I will hunt you down, you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’ll come visit. I’ll even take the ab circle pro out of your room.” Her grin widened.

“You don’t even have—goddammit, Shiro.”

“He’s full of good ideas, that young man. I ordered it just now, so if I were you, I’d get the hell out of Dodge before it’s delivered and I make you help me assemble it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he snorted, eyes bright with joy.

“Oh, and Lance?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Make sure you tidy your room. I don’t want a repeat of the state you left it in when you left for the Garrison.”

“ _ Sí _ , Mama.”

* * *

For all that it had been strange sitting in a room and feeling like he had outgrown it, it was far stranger coming home to a room he’d always thought of as temporary to find it fit him perfectly, where everything was as he liked it, and would remain so—his space, carved out to his ideal. In the last few days Lance had come to realise a new linguistic standard—that of ‘home’ and ‘ _ home _ home.’ Right now he was home, later he’d call  _ home _ home and show his mom around his room, but in the meantime, there was a little unpacking to be done.

Carefully, wary of their age, Lance lifted the seashells from his pack and removed the bubble wrap, setting them down pride of place beside other trinkets from his travels and forming an unbroken souvenir trail that stretched right from his earliest memories to the present.

_ Your home is where you make it _ , his mother had said, and he smiled.  _ You’ve made yours in the stars. _

‘Mother knows best’ wasn’t the half of it.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve just realised on a re-read that I mentioned Sam Holt going back to earth before Voltron - I wrote this in November/December, long before season 5, so now I’m tickled that I guessed that’s what he’d do!


End file.
